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Title: Reducing Facial Stereotype Bias in Consequential Social Judgments: Intervention Success With White Male Faces
Initial impressions of others based on facial appearances are often inaccurate yet can lead to dire outcomes. Across four studies, adult participants underwent a counterstereotype training to reduce their reliance on facial appearance in consequential social judgments of White male faces. In Studies 1 and 2, trustworthiness and sentencing judgments among control participants predicted whether real-world inmates were sentenced to death versus life in prison, but these relationships were diminished among trained participants. In Study 3, a sequential priming paradigm demonstrated that the training was able to abolish the relationship between even automatically and implicitly perceived trustworthiness and the inmates’ life-or-death sentences. Study 4 extended these results to realistic decision-making, showing that training reduced the impact of facial trustworthiness on sentencing decisions even in the presence of decision-relevant information. Overall, our findings suggest that a counterstereotype intervention can mitigate the potentially harmful effects of relying on facial appearance in consequential social judgments.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2235130
PAR ID:
10505076
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Sage
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Psychological Science
Volume:
35
Issue:
1
ISSN:
0956-7976
Page Range / eLocation ID:
21 to 33
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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